Oh my gosh! Quite a day. You can see on the white board picture below that the crew referred to today as the The Gorgeous Monster. Yesterday I called it the ride from Hell. Of course, their perspective may be influenced by the fact that they are riding in trucks and I am on a bicycle. It was actually a great day. We did 1oo KM which is not so far but we climbed 9,200 feet which is a lot.
The day started with a pretty hard climb up to about 2,400 feet. The biggest problem was not the amount of climbing but that several sections were very steep. I took some pictures from the top but for some unknown reason they are not in my pictures folder??? Once we crested there was an equivalent downhill that seem to last forever. It was very beautiful going down. It was mostly fir forest with a very fast moving stream next to the road. At the bottom was lunch at about 50KM and then climbing again, only higher. At the pre-ride meeting this morning the ride leader cautioned that the second downhill had multiple rock falls in the road, areas where there was no pavement, areas where there was significant portions of the road washed away, etc. He finished with …It should be an interesting ride. It was indeed. My hands are numb from continuously braking all the way down. The ride finished with a unfair significant 10KM climb up to the hotel.
By the way, Chris is doing well. He was transported to Athens, he did have a punctured lung and they will operate on him on Monday or Tuesday.
On days like this all you can do is keep pedaling. I’m convinced that if I had had died from a heart attack on the ride today my legs would have kept pedaling for at least a couple more hours.
Tomorrow is a shorter and less steep ride so hopefully we can recover a bit. Everyone is heading to bed early tonight. Quite a few riders couldn’t finish and they are particularly tired.
Stream along the first downhill
